what's in a language's name?
a few weeks ago we held the 7th edition of the Semantics of Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas conference at Cornell. we had a great bunch of speakers, working on a wide range of languages. besides the variety, i was very interested in the way that languages were represented in the program. issues of identity and linguistic and cultural preservation are of major concern for most native communities. as a result, there's a trend towards using speakers' preferred name for their language. frequently this is an endonym — the name of the language in the language itself.
i decided to compile a list of all the languages represented in talks and posters and see how far this trend has gone. i was a little surprised how few endonyms there were, although some of them jump off the page. in the list below, the name on the left is how the language appeared in the program; on the right is an alternate name. endonyms are italicized.
| Yucatec | Màaya t'àan |
| Tseltal | Batźil Ḱop |
| Navajo | Diné bizaad |
| Blackfoot | Siksika |
| Karitiana | ------ |
| Cheyenne | Tsėhesenėstsestotse |
| Tlingit | ------ |
| Ktunaxa | Kootenai |
| Nsyilxcen | Colville-Okanagan |
| Ka'apor | Urubú |
| Mapudungun | Mapuche |
| Mi'kmaq | Lnuismk |
| Yauyos Quechua | ------ |
| Inuktitut | Eskimo |
| Skarù:rę' | Tuscarora |
| Q'anjob'al | ------ |
| Guaraní | avañe'ẽ |
| Nɬeʔkepmxcín | Thompson |
| Saanich | SENĆOŦEN |
| Mbyá | ------ |
| Nez Perce | Niimiipuutímt |
| K'ichee' | Qatzijob'al |
aside from Blackfoot and Nez Perce, the SULA linguists didn't use any names that clearly came from Euro-Americans naming other peoples or languages. (i'm fairly sure that in these two cases, the Euro names have been claimed by the associated groups, and are considered standard and non-deprecating.) there are some such names that seem over the line for 21st century use. when constructing a LING 101 phonology problem set once, we had to turn to Wikipedia to find a less awful-sounding name for Swampy Cree; the endonym is Omaškêkowak.
nevertheless, just shy of half of the presenters used the endonym for their language of study. some of them are on beyond tongue twisters for native English speakers (i'm looking at you, Nɬeʔkepmxcín). some seem downright otherworldly. i'm considering using a selection of these in an exercise for my freshman seminar on constructed languages. if i give my students an unannotated list of language names, and ask which are natural languages (not telling them that they all are), i wonder which ones they will peg as constructed? i feel like Q'aanjob'al may trick them along the lines of space opera, and the all caps neo-orthography of SENĆOŦEN and the very non-English consonant clusters of Lnuismk could be a trap too.
keep in mind that this is not limited to Native American languages. much more familiar languages have strange endonyms that could trip up even well-educated English speakers. some examples would be Euskara, Suomi, and Cymraeg. (those are Basque, Finnish, and Welsh, respectively. all European languages, all of which i didn't know the endonyms for until after i became a linguist). the question is whether they would just be unfamiliar, or actually make people believe they were constructed. i'm not teaching my course again until next spring, but when i do i'll report back with results. if anyone else wants to try something similar in the meantime, i'd be interested in hearing how it goes.
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6 comments:
Hey Ed. Mi'kmaq is sort of an Anglicised endonym btw: Mi'kmaq people also use 'Mi'kmawi'simk' for the language's name and 'mi'kmawi'si' 'I speak Mi'kmaq.' They also seem to use 'Mi'kmaq' and 'L'nu'k,' 'The People,' interchangeably as a name for themselves, but 'l'nu' (the singular) can also mean just 'native person.' When they speak or write English I have only ever seen 'Mi'kmaq' for the name of the language.
I don't know what the situation was historically though - it could be that 'mi'kmawi'si' was formed later by analogy with 'l'nuisi,' 'I speak a native language/the language of The People.'
yeah, the line between endonym and …ectonym? wasn't very clear for some languages. and my sources here are Wikipedia, although most of the articles seem to rely on Ethnologue heavily.
"Micmac" is the most Anglo version of the name that i've seen. "Lnuismk" is clearly from a different root, as you pointed out — it would definitely be the name i'd choose to try to fool my students, though!
Fair enough. I think the 'lnu-' root is the older one used to refer to themselves. 'Micmac' is the old Anglo orthography. 'Mi'kmaq' is the preferred tribal orthography now (or at least it is in NS - the community in Quebec use a different orthography ...
Another interesting thing is that Mi'kmaq speakers generally report preferring to express things as descriptions/actions rather than as a bare noun, so I suspect (but don't know for sure) that calling the language 'L'nui'smk' or the other version might sound artificial in the language - I mean, it's there in the dictionary, but you mostly only get tangible objects being referred to with nouns and this is clearly a derived noun. So then as a linguist wanting to be respectful and use the native name for a language, you may come up against the situation of there being no proper noun that isn't a weird derived thing resulting from contact with a colonial language ... in which case you go with whatever the community actually use.
Suomi is Finnish. Swedish is Svenska.
duh, i knew that. fixed.
Alaskan usage ("Eskimo" or "Alaska Native") aside, "Eskimo" is considered pejorative in Canada and Greenland, the preferred term being Inuit (Inuk, singular). The reasoning follows its being attributed to Cree and other Algonkian language name-calling related to a practice of eating raw flesh. While such may be the case (Cf. Cree askamiciw, "he eats it raw"), and a couple other less insulting alternate derivations exist, the mere possibility of the more graphic etymology has scandalized the general use of "Eskimo".
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